President-elect Donald Trump’s reelection is already popping up in post-Election Day earnings calls.
CFO Brew sifted through 27 recent earning calls and found executives touting Trump’s stances on international trade, energy regulations and incentives, and immigration, among other things, and opining how his second term may impact their companies’ bottom lines.
Offshore no more? Shoe designer Steve Madden grabbed national attention when its chief executive said the company would soon source far less of its products from China to avoid expected heavy tariffs on Chinese imports.
“We've worked hard over a multiyear period to develop our factory base and our sourcing capability in alternative countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, Brazil, etc.,” CEO Edward Rosenfeld said on a Nov. 7 earnings call, as CFO Brew previously reported.
But Rosenfeld was not the only company exec who talked about Trump’s penchant for tariffs.
Ian Fillinger, president and CEO of lumber company Interfor Corp., said his company would have a better idea of how it will be impacted by Trump’s promised across-the-board tariffs by Q2 next year.
Interfor will benefit from diversity, both in the geographies it operates in and the products it sells, according to Fillinger.
“We’re taking a view that, generally, it could be positive for us relative to some of these tariffs that are in place today and coming in the future,” he told investors.
Feeling energetic. The energy industry expects to have its clean-energy cake and eat its fossil fuel-soaked one, too.
Tom Long, co-CEO of oil and gas transportation and infrastructure company Energy Transfer, said during the company’s Nov. 6 Q3 earnings call: “What a breath of fresh air the Trump Administration is going to bring.” Long said the oil and gas industry needed “reasonable” instead of “onerous regulation.”
Nicole Bulgarino, president of federal solutions and utility infrastructure at Ameresco Inc., reminded attendees of a recent earnings call that the renewable energy company’s federal group “had some of its best years” during Trump’s first term, when “the volume of [Energy Savings Performance Contracting] contracts was approximately three times what we have seen during the Biden Administration.”
Cracking down, cashing out. A central Trump campaign promise was the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Companies in the carceral system believe this could be good for their businesses.
It’s “positive thematically” that Trump said during the campaign he’d crack down on big-city crime and illegal border crossings because his administration “would require probably head count and technology deployment to help on both those fronts,” Greg Brown, CEO of Motorola Solutions Inc., said during a Nov. 7 earnings call.
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Motorola Solutions sells security and communications technology to numerous industries, including military and law enforcement, according to the company’s website. Three-quarters of its revenue comes from “public safety government,” Brown noted on the earnings call.
Trump’s electoral win means “there’s going to be increased need for detention capacity” from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Damon Hininger, CEO of CoreCivic Inc., which owns and manages private prisons, said on its most recent earnings call. Hininger said the company is “taking proactive steps” to make all of its 18,000 vacant beds available.
GEO Group Inc., another private prison company, is “ready to provide additional services and resources to help ICE meet its future needs,” George Zoley, GEO’s executive chairman, said on an earnings call. The company has 10,000 beds at “idle facilities” it owns and another 8,000 empty beds under contract that it could make available, he said.
Seeing green. Executives of cannabis companies seemed happy with the results, and not just because of the stuff they may or may not have smoked before their earnings calls.
Boris Jordan, CEO of Curaleaf Holdings, said that under a Trump Administration, he expects marijuana will be reclassified as a schedule III drug and that lawmakers will pass the SAFER Banking Act. Trump has signaled his support for both, according to media reports.
“We’ve already been in touch with his transition team to ensure that the new administration follows through on its commitments made to the industry,” Jordan told investors.
According to a bill summary, the SAFER Banking Act would allow banks to do business with state-sanctioned cannabis companies without fear of punishment by federal regulators.
George Archos, founder and CEO of Verano Holdings Corp., an operator of cannabis dispensaries across the country, said the company is preparing to pounce “on any and all opportunities at our disposal” following an expected rescheduling.
“We are excited to embark on a new partnership with the Trump administration to usher in a fresh era for legal cannabis, while simultaneously edging out the dangers of the illicit market,” he said in a recent earnings call.